Obama at Brookings

It's hard to judge a speech like the one Obama just gave at the Brookings Institution here in Washington about job creation and the deficit. Invariably, such presidential speeches aren't excruciatingly specific -- Obama rather glaringly did not get into the subject of specific costs. In addition, proposals like these can't really be judged for months.

What was immediately striking, however, was the rhetorical tone. It was a very pointed speech, quite partisan in places. He made a totally unapologetic case for the TARP spending. It was despised, he acknowledged, but he insisted that "no program" has been "more necessary" to digging the country out of the economic hole.

Recent reports that banks are actually paying the money back at higher-than-expected rates, which might free up as much as $200 million for job creation, would seem to support his case.

He dinged the Bush administration for assembling the TARP program in a way that was "understandably" hasty but not well thought out and noted (cough cough) that his administration had fixed those implementation problems. He took other little jibes at conservative critics.

And substantively, he said in sum: we are going to keep spending -- on infrastructure, green jobs and so on -- and we're not going to succumb to political pressure to make deficit-reduction the immediate be-all-and-end-all priority.

In other words, for a wonky policy speech delivered in such sedate precincts, it was pretty hardball. Interesting.

The meta-message he's trying to get out to people, of course, is that once healthcare is done, the administration's top three foci will be jobs, jobs and jobs. It's the right message, obviously. But again, it will be months before we can render any kind of verdict on these proposals.

The $64,000 question is: will time demonstrate that Democratic methods -- deficit spending, public investment even during a period of great debt -- will get us out of this recession in a way most people can live with? If the answer is no, then the Democrats will suffer.

But if the answer to that question turns out to be yes, then the GOP and the tea partiers will end up discredited in the eyes of independent voters. Obama has placed his bet. And there wasn't much that was wishy-washy in the way he explained it this morning.